Racial Disharmony

A decade of unprecedented civil rights to the freed population of the United States opened with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, which gave African American men the right to vote and to run for office.¹⁶ Three years later constitutional amendments reinforced these victories.

During this progressive period, freedpeople used their newly acquired civil rights to change local and state governance. But Southern white people and Northern conservatives aggressively fought against their new rights. Therefore, administrations used explicit violence, fraud, poll taxes, and literacy tests to prevent African Americans from registering and voting. In 1883, the US Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial discrimination by private parties. In 1896, the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision affirmed the constitutionality of racial segregation in public spaces, schools, transportation, and the military. In the South, African Americans also faced continuous racial animosity through lynching and other brutal forms of violence. White supremacy and racism prevailed in various spheres in the North as well. To escape this hostile environment, as discussed in chapter 17, some African Americans decided to relocate to West Africa. Other groups took a different path. For example, during this period, thousands of former bondspeople organized themselves to demand pensions from the federal government as reparations for slavery.

In contrast with the United States, legal segregation was neither codified nor implemented in Latin American countries and Brazil, where racism was not (and is not) based on the idea of the “one-drop rule” (i.e., a person with even one Black ancestor, or “one drop” of “Black blood,” is considered Black) but instead on a combination of colorism and classism. Ultimately, despite the lack of legal segregation, in practice racial hierarchies and racism continued to operate in Latin America, and especially in Brazil, where the population of African descent was and still is bigger than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. As a military coup established a new Republican government in Brazil in November 1889, the state refused to integrate the newly freed population. As elsewhere in the Americas, the idea that Black people would disturb the social order prevailed.¹⁹

Regardless of regional differences, in Brazil probably more than anywhere else in the Americas, few freedpeople had access to land ownership. Moreover, the Republican military government continued to deny full citizenship to the freed population. A few years before emancipation, Brazil passed legislation preventing illiterate people from voting in a country where 80 percent of the population, including its large Black population, could not read and write.²⁰ Moreover, the new Constitution of 1891 established that only male individuals older than twenty-one years of age with certain income levels had the right to vote. Both the previous legislation and the new constitution disenfranchised Black Brazilians, most of whom were illiterate and remained living in poor conditions, especially the recently emancipated men and women.

Brazil also faced the question of how to replace its enslaved workforce. As soon as the pressures to ban the Atlantic slave trade started in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and during its final five decades of slavery, the Brazilian monarchy subsidized the arrival of new European immigrants, especially to work on the coffee plantations in the ParaĂ­ba Valley.

At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly one million European immigrants entered Brazil. European immigration certainly increased Brazil’s white and mixed-race population, but whitening was not the only motivation to encourage subsidized European immigration. There was an actual immediate need for skilled workers in São Paulo, a region that was not so attractive by that time. Unlike the British, French, and Spanish colonies in the West Indies, Brazil passed a decree in 1890 banning altogether the immigration of people from Africa and Asia to avoid increasing its population of color.²² In 1892, a new law permitted Brazil to receive immigrants from China and Japan.²³ Yet, the new law’s approval was not extended to immigrants from the African continent.²⁴ But despite these efforts, the whitening project was much less effective in Brazil than it was in a country such as Argentina, where the Black population was smaller and where a larger number of European immigrants was much more significant.

In the United States, Brazil, and other Latin American societies where slavery existed, race became the dominant tool to regulate whether individuals or groups were identified as enslavers or enslaved. Persons identified as white, regardless of whether their ancestors owned enslaved people or not, inherited the social and economic advantages historically assigned to white individuals. In contrast, persons racialized as Black have carried the stigma associated with the slave past of their ancestors, even though a minority of persons identified as Black became slave traders and slave owners, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as the freedpeople who relocated from Brazil in West Africa during the nineteenth century.

If whitening failed as a pseudoscientific measure in Brazil, it succeeded instead as an ideology that erased the differences between poor white, Black, and free mixed-race individuals. This new “silence” around race led all these groups, to certain extent, to lose their color, as historian Hebe Mattos put it, because the terms associated with Black automatically evoked the legal status of slave among individuals who were now freedpeople.²⁵ Moreover, whitening policies contributed to support for the ideology that promoted the idea of Brazil as a society free of racism and where harmonious race relations prevailed, while masking the importance of the Brazilian Black population. This belief drew on the contribution of several nineteenth-century European travel accounts, such as the three-volume travelogue of Jean-Baptiste Debret, whose illustrations were discussed in several chapters of this book. These accounts emphasized the overall configuration of Brazil’s paternalist slave society, which included a huge enslaved population that participated in all economic and social activities and was omnipresent in the domestic environment. Enslaved people mingling with their owners in multiple settings and the absence of legal racial segregation, in contrast with the United States, helped nurture the idea that the country was a racially mixed nation in which racism did not exist. This view was supported by the work of Brazilian scholars who claimed that slavery had been milder in Brazil than in the United States; that, drawing on the tolerance of Luso-Brazilian Catholicism, Brazilian society had been hybrid since the beginning and therefore harmonious racial relations prevailed.²⁶ As many scholars have demonstrated, nothing in this misleading view could be further from the truth.²⁷